Here’s one dirty secret about war weariness. It’s cumulative.

It cuts both ways. People with an actual knowledge of what war entails are likely to be cynical about facile jingoism yet simultaneously possess a real abiding horror of watching things they’ve sacrificed for thrown lightly away. It’s a tug of war in which the outcome is decided by which looks worse the greater evil: the return or renewal of all the bad, horrifying and smelly experiences coming back again or a threat which can imagine to be real unless it’s actually scorched them. To simultaneously know that war is not a picnic yet understand that defeat is not the same as losing a ball game is a painful kind of understanding.

Especially when you get older you just know that you can’t do it again. That knowledge coexists, unhappily, with the realization that you might have to do it again. Another absurdity, but human conflict is interesting in that way: it’s like an event horizon where logic and morality get smeared out and things run to the asymptote. And like the guy who has a choice of committing suicide or a war crime there are situations where you are simply behind the 8-ball with no escape. And I believe that if you ask, a lot of people will attribute their survival, either physically or as morally whole persons, purely to luck.